Dolly, Rejection and Radiohead Journalism

What does an award-winning journalist do when she has a great story, and no one will publish it? If she’s Paige Williams, she sets her work free and crowdsources the fee in an experiment she calls “Radiohead journalism.”Did she succeed? Is this a sustainable model? In a guest column Williams tells the story of her story.

Dolly Freed lives in Texas now, and birding is still a big part of her life. Photo By Audra Melton

I pitched the whole world on Dolly Freed. Seriously, every magazine you can think of and a hundred more.

Nobody was interested in a profile of a woman who used to eat roadkill, make moonshine, and sit around reading Sartre with her alcoholic and probably-genius father, a woman who later went on to get her GED, put herself through college, and become a NASA rocket scientist who helped figure out the mess behind the Challenger explosion before turning her back on that world for a life that felt more authentic and invigorating.

Yeah, I can’t see the appeal whatsoever.

So after months of rejection, I bought myself a website about and used it to self-publish a long-form feature story about a month ago, called “Finding Dolly Freed.”

Dolly was 18 when she wrote the book, and she did it on a seventh-grade education, and she did it pseudonymously because she was a teenage truant and she and her father had an intriguing relationship with the law. I won’t go into the whole history of Dolly and Possum Living, but to summarize: After the post-publishing blitz and glitz, Dolly slipped back out of sight, and all over the Internet her fans wondered what had become of her. What became of her was Texas, among other things.

I went down there last spring to see if this woman was for real. She now lives and works outside Houston as an environmental educator, and she goes by her real name, which I promised I wouldn’t reveal. She still lives a frugal lifestyle. Dolly is, she told me, “half-possuming.”

Her way of seeing the world fascinated me, partly for personal reasons. When I first heard about Dolly, on April 29, 2009, over dinner at Holden’s in Portland, Oregon, I tended to make life as complicated as possible. My default setting was Fraught. I worked like a person possessed, to the exclusion of any potential happiness. I wanted so many things and was getting none of them. I was plugging emotional holes with food and random housewares and other kinds of filler. Dolly lived an opposite lifestyle. I can’t even imagine her pushing a shopping cart through Target and obsessing over whether to change her bathroom color scheme. I still bought into the idea that owning matching towels signaled something — stability, maybe; adulthood.

Meanwhile, my industry, magazine publishing, had stumbled into a sick abyss. Journalists — very excellent journalists — were (and are) out of work. Hell, I was out of work. I was two days out of a job and thinking about a short date with a high bridge when I first heard about Dolly. What I’m saying is, Dolly Freed felt like a story for our times.

Possum Living was scheduled for re-release on January 1. In early December, the New York Times bought Dolly (yay!) for its Style pages but killed it when I declined to reveal Dolly’s real name (boo!). With time bearing down and no good move remaining, I hired a web designer and ran the piece online. I decided to include a PayPal link in hopes of recouping some of the $2,000-plus expense of executing the project. Anybody could read “Finding Dolly Freed” for free but had the option to donate whatever amount they chose, sort of the way Radiohead did with In Rainbows.

At that point, the Dolly Freed project became not only an exercise in self-publishing but also an experiment in “Radiohead journalism.” Would readers pay for a story that they could read for free on an independent website by a writer they’d never heard of?

I describe the project more fully at www.paige-williams.com, but in the meantime, here are a few of the outcomes and things I learned:

1. Social media works. “Finding Dolly Freed” launched on the morning of January 6. I let friends, family, and colleagues know via e-mail, then tweeted the story and posted a short notice on my Facebook page. I had about 480 Facebook friends at the time and about 130 followers on Twitter. Now, one month later, 60 more Facebookers have friended up, and the Twitter stream has drawn 340 followers.

In the Twitterverse, 340 followers is a relatively miniscule number; I’m making a point about the radiant power of social networking, a power I refused to admit before Dolly Freed. Twitter so stressed and annoyed me, I was thinking of shutting my stream down. Yet without Twitter and other share sites, “Finding Dolly Freed” would have sat quietly and invisibly for all eternity as just another microparticle of cyberspace. Between January 6 and February 14, the site got 6,497 visits, 5,190 of them from unique users. The top 10 referrers: stumbleupon.com, direct connection, Google/organic, NPR’s onthemedia.org, bookslut.com, jezebel.com, Facebook, Twitter, realsimple.com, and Google/referral.

2. People are awesome. A few of the characters behind the Dolly project worked for no money or for expenses only, the kind of generosity that blows my mind. They did it not out of love for me, because I can be pretty unlovable at times, but because they, like me, were truly interested in what would happen. As the site drew traffic, media types asked whether Radiohead journalism was scalable. My answer: I don’t know. But I do know that as long as we ask questions and provoke dialogue we’ll get some interesting attempts at an answer — we’ll get ideas.

Powerful crowdhosts are critical to the dialogue. If the brilliant Adam Penenberg (@Penenberg) and Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) hadn’t been cool enough to tweet the Dolly project, it never would’ve entered this particular sliver of the public consciousness in a way that compelled other journalists to talk about it. (You gotta follow both of these guys, by the way. Rosen’s Twitter stream is like an S&M salon for brainiacs: you never know if you’re gonna get smooched or smacked.)

Really, it took a digivillage. My talented pal Audra Melton (www.audramelton.com) travels the world as a photographer but happened to be free and to be game to jump on a plane and go to Texas to photograph Dolly, for literally no paycheck. (In fact, I’m pretty sure she lost money in the deal.) Another friend, Geoff Gagnon, a talented young editor at Boston magazine, took time out from spending Christmas with his family in Michigan to edit the piece, and refused to accept a dime. Everyone else got paid, and those expenses went into the debit column along with Audra’s travel, my initial travel to Texas (air, hotel, car), website design expenses ($800 plus other fees for web hosting, domain registration, etc.), and miscellaneous Fed Ex and photocopying charges.

I didn’t expect the donation link to work, much less for anyone to contribute, but minutes after the site went live, the first PayPal email hit my inbox: “Notification of Donation Received.” The contributions have all but stopped now, but they came regularly for weeks, in amounts ranging from 50 cents to $100. Two people gave $100: Penenberg, author of Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves, and Hank Stuever, a wonderful Washington Post feature writer and the author, most recently, of Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present.

“I’m happy to feel strongly enough about what you do — what we do — to put money behind it,” Stuever wrote in an email. “I feel it all going away: serendipitous stories, lark, wonder, exploration, heart. Everything in the newsroom now is just reactive, scoop-centered, gossipy, fuss-and-chit-chat. I have lots of thoughts about that, which I’m still sorting through, and may never sort through.”

Most donations arrived without comment. The overwhelming majority came, surprisingly, from strangers. A few businesses stepped up. Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, the best independent bookstore on earth, offered to put a portion of the proceeds from its Possum Living sales toward my bottom line.

As of February 14, 160 people had donated just over $1,500 from around the world. The givers were evenly split among men and women and lived all over: East Coast, Pacific Northwest, Australia, Brazil. California by far represented better than any other state (thanks, Cali!). I’m compiling an angels list to run on the website (names and locations only) and at some point very soon will thank every last one of these incredibly kind and encouraging people. And get this: a check came the other day, from the New York Times — my kill fee. A kill fee usually runs 20 percent; the Times paid 50 percent. Which was a pretty cool thing to do.

That check put me over the top. I’ve now made back the out-of-pocket money I spent reporting the story — that is to say the very real output for travel, etc. Which brings up a whole new round of questions. Continue to run the PayPal link in hopes of earning an actual paycheck for my small staff and myself? Or give up on factoring in the intangible expenses of reporting/writing: time spent interviewing, reading, writing, thinking, rewriting, contributing to the website construction, and otherwise obsessing?

Web gurus have sent terrific suggestions about how to elevate the site — really make it go — but all of those fixes take money and expertise. Would additional income improve the Dolly Freed reading experience and/or stoke the next project? My next idea is an interdisciplinary one that involves video, which ain’t cheap.

3. You gotta burp the baby. I thought I could release Dolly into the wild and my work would be done. Puh. Once you birth the baby you gotta feed her, change her diapers, protect her from bullies, take her out into public. The back-end work included tweaking the site, answering queries, tweeting and retweeting, and monitoring the web for mentions or questions that needed either immediate attention or restrained silence. Momentum dies without a master.

So did Radiohead journalism succeed? I guess it depends on the definition of success. In the strictest sense of the word, yes, it worked: I recovered my costs. Yet you could look at the visitor-donation ratio — 160 of more than 5,000 visitors contributed — and extrapolate that this doesn’t appear to be a sustainable model, at least not in its current form. I choose to look at it this way: 160 people sent money they didn’t have to spend, to a person they didn’t even know — that, to me, is wondrous.

Someone else may find a better way to indie journalism in this form — I hope so. I’d be thrilled to see an independent self-publishing model fly, but if you’ll allow me a dogmatic moment here, for it to be truly meaningful the journalism must be inviolable: Story and storytelling matter but so does the journalist and whether he/she has built the story on a foundation of reporting and integrity. Institutional backing confers credibility, but in the wilds of the Internet, you’re on your own; trust begins and ends with you and your standards and approach.

On the radio the other day I inadvertently sounded a sort of bone-headed death knell for long-form magazine narrative. The truth is, the question of narrative, and the future of narrative, and the interplay between print and web as regards the future of narrative, are a lot more nuanced than the typical sound byte allows. Narrative isn’t going anywhere.

After oxygen and carbon, humans are made up of stories; telling and craving them is elemental to our existence. The growing question is where we’ll tell our stories, and how, and how to monetize online narrative without bastardizing it. The good news is it’s anybody’s game.

Paige Williams won the 2008 National Magazine Award for feature writing and has written for publications including the New York Times, New York magazine, Salon.com, the Financial Times (FT) magazine, GQ, and O: The Oprah Magazine. She’s the new executive editor of Boston magazine. Follow her on Twitter at @paigeawilliams